Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to check out some new reading material that enlightened me on the importance of web standardization, along with several other interesting tidbits. One of the articles I was given as a suggestion to read through was on improving web quality and our overall user experience. It makes note of the fact that most websites out there on the web are not validated. The article provides a list of what some webmasters, web developers, and html users thought about making their websites standard-complaint. It’s nice to get a sense of why they chose not to validate, mostly for reasons such as a lack of knowledge or understanding, along with a follow-up on why they should. I completely agreed that most websites out there should follow this advice of relegating to the needs of what the W3C considers standard as it will provide a huge payoff in the end. You can really go no wrong in having you website checked out by a markup validation service.
In the article, ”Web Standards, Browsers And Designing For The Future” by James Opiko, checking for compatibility on other browsers is also one of the processes used in making sure your website is standards-complaint. This is crucial in helping to keep your site uniform throughout various browers. You shouldn’t design around just one browser and hope it will look the same on others. Problems will most likely occur if you’ve been designing a site that hasn’t been reviewed on other browsers. My brother, who is also a web designer himself, has experience in what this article talks about as I’m sure many others as well. He could never get his website to look exactly the same on I.E. after testing it on FireFox and Safari. We both absolutely despise I.E but you just can’t ignore the fact that the majority of online users out there are still using that particular browser, especially since it is the standard default browser installed on all PCs.
Most websites nowadays are designed using cascading style sheets (css) and that shouldn’t be ignored, it should be embraced as it is the future of web design. I’ve been designing and managing websites for over 7 years and I see how much the web has evolved since the early days. It is so much more flexible and manageable to design using css.
